Clara Barton, Olympia Brown, and Fanny Kemble:Three Women Who Dared To Go For ItSermon Delivered bySandra WilsonAugust 13, 2006
Clara Barton, Olympia Brown, and Fanny Kemble were three Unitarian and Universalist women who dared to really go for it and I was awestruck by each of these women as I studied to prepare this sermon because of just that - that they all-out went for it. They didn't even seem to see the fences of cultural restrictions and taboos with which they were surrounded, except maybe as they judged how high they must bound to get over them. - And get over them they did! In giant leaps they transcended those cultural boundaries and moved out into the fields of need that were everywhere surrounding them just outside those restricting walls which were built upon the foundational idea of women as subservient, weak, powerless beings.
And talk about getting out of the 'comfort zone'. I doubt that these three women spent a single day of their adult lives in a comfort zone. Olympia Brown though at age 38, married John Henry Willis, an unusual man for the times who lovingly supported her completely in all she undertook. In her family life with him I'm sure she found comfort, but she stepped out of that comfort almost every day to put herself on the front lines of changing the Universalist ministry and in changing the status of American women.
Their sheer courage - courage in the face of physical danger and courage in the face of disrespectful treatment and humiliation - the courage to go for it no matter what, is the mark of all three of these incredible Unitarian and Universalist forbears of us all, not just of women.
I
When we think of Clara Barton, chances are that she is one of those names from the nineteenth century that we vaguely know from our school days - a nurse lady who started the Red Cross. We quite likely had not heard the name Olympia Brown until becoming a Unitarian Universalist. And it is very possible that Fanny Kemble is an unfamiliar name.
But that is not how things should be; these are people who made huge contributions to our progress as a nation and as a society. They have significance for their official accomplishments and I believe, for their unofficial accomplishments - just for being as people, women, whose lives can inspire all who look upon the way they lived out their time on this earth and find in it a model of courage and creativity after which to strive.
I am awed by their endless energy and commitment to their own visions of the way things
It is my purpose this morning to make known a bit more, the lives, work, accomplishments, and the significance of these three famous UUs, *to show how they exemplify our UU ideals and values, and to show how the way they lived their lives illuminates what I believe we all, in our hearts, strive for as UUs - to be part of the work of creating lasting, important, good changes in the world that reflect the principles in which we believe.
It is my purpose of course *to honor these great leaders, groundbreakers, and creators, but more so it is my purpose to use them - to use them as examples to whom we might look for inspiration as we go about the work of making the world better and more fair for everyone.
II
Fanny Kemble
When Clara Barton was nine years old, and Olympia Brown was three years short of being born, Fanny Kemble, a 23 year old English woman from a family of famous English actors, came to America with her father. She made friends quickly, one of whom was the famous Unitarian Reverend William Ellery Channing and in letters she wrote that "she now considered herself a Unitarian".
She was an immediate smash hit in America as an actress as she had been in England. Unsurprisingly, she caught the eye of a very wealthy Unitarian man, Pierce Butler of Philadelphia and of Georgia where his family owned a very large plantation. Fanny retired from the stage and married Pierce in 1832.
The honeymoon period lasted until Fanny made her first visit to the Butler Family's Sea Island, Georgia plantation where Pierce was the owner of more than 700 slaves. She was not aware, until that plantation visit, of what Pierce's great wealth consisted. She was shocked at what she saw and immediately began to express her disgust and abhorrence of the cruelty she saw all around her and that was found to be acceptable, righteous, and normal.
Coming from a different kind of society, where slavery was not the norm, and blessed by a conscience and a creative way of seeing the world and its people, she was not under the influence of the pious arguments rotely used to support the institution of slavery, nor was she beholden to the self-perpetuating economic system. It was her marriage and growing family that forced her to continue as an unwilling participant in slavery.
She was unwilling because it was inescapable, but she was not quiet nor was she docile about it. Fanny continuously argued and fought with her husband over his slave-owning. She wrote a daily journal that chronicled slavery from her intimate perspective - one of the only critical accounts of slavery written from the perspective of a slave-owner, ever to come out of the American South. She advocated and interceded for the slaves. She surreptitiously taught some to read, an illegal act.
At one point, in an attempt to bring Fanny properly under his control and to punish her, Pierce Butler had his wife stripped and then whipped in the same way the slaves were whipped.
Finally, in a scandalous and much publicized case, Pierce divorced Fanny. She lost everything including the right to see her children until they were grown women.
To support herself, Fanny returned to the stage, but her real love had always been writing, and so this is what she did. She wrote plays, poetry, travelogues, and literary criticism.
Her most significant work though, was the part of her personal journals which chronicled her life, experiences, and observations on the plantation in Georgia. It was published in 1863 and was an immediate hit in the North, especially among Abolitionists because it so clearly supported their contentions.
But in England this journal directly affected the course of history. England had been tending toward favoring slavery and the Confederacy, but Fanny's journal of her personal experience of slavery - the journal that she had risked so much in order to produce - so affected the English people when they read it, that support for slavery quickly vanished and all thoughts of it as a viable system soon disappeared from English politics and society and England then lent its support to the cause of the Northern States and the Union.
So by a private act of courageously writing her truth and eventually sharing that truth, Fanny shaped the world.
Fanny Kemble's is a name that I will speak. We owe much to her seizing her day.
Clara Barton
Clara Barton was raised in an active Universalist family. She remained a Universalist throughout her adult life.
From her teenaged years on, Clara overcame prejudice and was a woman of many accomplishments. It was when the Civil War began though, when Clara was 40, that she began the life work that made her one of the most famous women in America. It was then that she answered a call that she heard in her heart, and made herself into the nurse who came to be named, 'The Angel of the Battlefield'.
This story of Clara Barton is well-known - how she struggled and risked her own life to bring medical supplies and care to the wounded and sick soldiers on the Civil War battlefields; how she went to the battlefields of Europe in the decades after that; and how she founded in 1877 and then directed for the next 27 years, the American Red Cross.
But there is much more that Clara was during her long life - organizer, lobbyist, author, speaker, supporter of women's rights, and just an amazing person. In 1896, at age 75, she sailed with a cargo of supplies from Cuba to Turkey to help the victims of the Armenian Massacre. She delivered supplies to Cuba during the Spanish American War. At age 79, she went to Galveston and participated in the relief work for victims of the Galveston Flood.
"I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done ... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past." This is how Clara described her way of going into the world to make it a better place.
Clara Barton is a larger-than-life model of a person whose life and work reflects the principles in which we Unitarian Universalists believe.
Olympia Brown
"Miss Brown, against my better judgment, I'm afraid, the council wishes to ordain you today into the Universalist ministry." Then Dr. Fisher, the president of St. Lawrence Universalist Seminary smiled at Olympia Brown and added, "And I shall participate. I know that ministry is not for a woman, but I know courage when I see it. If congregations wish to hear you, then they shall hear you as a minister of God in full standing."
Now these words might not sound very courageous to us now, but when they were uttered in 1863, they were referring to an earth-shaking event that was about to happen, an event that required great courage on the part of the representatives of the Universalist denomination. They were about to ordain Olympia Brown as a Universalist minister - the first woman ever to be ordained in any religious denomination.
For Rev. Brown too, courage was certainly required, but she also needed stamina, creativity, and a very thick skin to meet the challenges and battles of her 24 difficult but successful years in the Universalist ministry.
Olympia, with the support of her husband, always too was a champion of women's rights. After her retirement from the ministry she took national leadership roles in the movement and put the same vigor, courage, and commitment into her work for the rights of women that she had formerly put into her history-making ministry. She was committed to this work until her last breath was drawn.
But before that last breath, she voted in her first presidential election at the age of 85 for she was one of the few original suffragists still alive in 1919 when the Women's Suffrage Amendment was finally passed.
For the centennial celebration of her ordination, the Theological School at St. Lawrence University unveiled a plaque which reads in part: "Reverend Olympia Brown...Preacher of Universalism, Pioneer and Champion of Women's Citizenship Rights, Forerunner of the New Era, The flame of her spirit still burns today...."
III
Yes, these are women, individual people, who have gone out into the field, shaken the tree, and made the old ways to fall down. Yes, these are women, individual people, who, for their great achievements. They have made it to the pages of history books and websites. Yes, these are women, people, who have led the way for all of us to new places of justice and fairness for all people. Yes, these are women who have created and shaped anew the institutions upon which we depend.
These are people, who deserve our adulation, veneration, gratitude, and celebration - and to whom we owe that veneration and celebration.
These are women who have been prophets of the future; they spoke out their prophecies and they risked their own emotional and physical selves to live out their prophecies.
I would like to read for you now, Reading #565 from our hymnal. It's by Clinton Lee Scott and is called "Prophets".
#565 Prophets Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision. It is easier blindly to venerate the saints than to learn the human quality of their sainthood. It is easier to glorify the heroes of the race than to give weight to their examples. To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their wisdom. Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values. Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes gather up the stones to build the prophet's monument. Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.
"Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes gather up the stones to build the prophet's monument."
Weighty stones were thrown at these prophets in their day, for they prophesied the end of institutions that had existed since the beginnings of civilization - slavery, the inferiority of women, and the inevitability of death and disease as a result of war.
We are the grandchildren of these prophets. It is our lot to gather up the stones that were thrown at them, to use those stones to build our monument to these prophets, and that monument must be the works that we do in this age to confront the problems of our time and the needs of this age, in order that we do our part to shape the direction of the evolution of the world toward the good and just and healthy.
Blessed Be and Amen
References
Famous Unitarians and Universalists, Fred E. Lange Jr. . in UUCLV collection We Speak Your Names, Pearl Cleage. One World-Ballantine Books, New York. 2005 A Year With Our Liberal Heritage, Willard C. Frank, Jr. 1984. In UUCLV collection The Unitarians and the Universalists, David Robinson. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. 1985 A Faith People Make, Stephen Kendrick. 1988. In UUCLV Collection http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/olympiabrown.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Kemble http://www.civilwarhome.com/bartonbio.htm ©2006 Sandra Wilson |